May 12, 2008

Get ready for the green industrial revolution

Construction Corner

Korky Koroluk

Every week, it seems, there is a new or different, or rediscovered technology that captures the great global warming spotlight for a few days.

We’ve had concentrated solar power recently, thin-film technology for solar cells, major increases in wind power capacity, wave power off the coast of Scotland, road surfaces as solar collectors, with the road’s ballast acting as heat storage media.

We even had, last month, a German-registered cargo ship powered in part by an immense kite launched 200 to 300 metres in the air.

All sorts of ideas, some old, some revamped, some all new. And all helping make the point that as we deal with the energy crunch that is part of the drawn-out emergency known as global warming, there are going to be many, many bit players in the drive toward solutions. But there is unlikely to be one big star.

This week I’ve gone over a lot of material on recycling waste energy — capturing heat that’s usually wasted and turning it into clean electricity and steam, producing more power while using less fossil fuel.

There are studies (how good they are, I don’t know) showing that manufacturers and power plants that recycle energy end up doubling their energy efficiency while reducing both over-all costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, some government-sponsored studies in the United States suggest that recycling energy could provide enough clean power to replace almost 400 coal-fired generation plants in that country, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent.

Another study, by the McKinsey Global Institute, tells us that more than $50 billion drifts away into the air each year in the form of waste heat — unused, unclaimed and largely unnoticed.

That’s sad, because the technologies needed to save that money are, for the most part, already at hand — and some of them have been at hand for several decades.

Outdated regulatory structures are part of the problem. Sheer inertia is another. Public resistance to anything that looks like a tax or a higher fee is yet another. And the end result is an environment in which it’s difficult for energy recyclers to gain a foothold, which, in turn, means an energy system that is scarcely more efficient than it was 50 years ago.

Before any great gains can be made in this area, the regulatory system must be modernized, and that would take an exercise in political will that I don’t see anywhere on the horizon.

Political will would also be needed for significant action on high-speed rail for both passenger and freight traffic — especially in the Quebec City-Windsor and Calgary-Edmonton corridors.

I simply don’t see how any senior government, that is not working on high-speed rail, can say it is concerned about energy.

Of course, I’m not sure government realizes something that many in the private sector already know — that there is a new industrial revolution under way.

As with the industrial revolution that began in England 250 or so years ago, there will be winners and losers. The winners will be those that first figure out the technologies and public policies — especially regarding energy — that will support and lead the revolution.

The losers will be the rest of us.

In 1938, Aldo Leopold, the American scientist, naturalist and ethicist, wrote that the oldest task in human history is “to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”

With the right policies, the right technologies, the right incentives, it still might be possible to succeed in that task.

Companies now are seeing that reducing energy use can lower their input costs and improve their profitability. By integrating environmental concerns into all of their business processes, they are taking the first steps of the new industrial revolution.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com.

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